CONJURING HITLER: HOW GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA CREATED THE THIRD REICH AND DESTROYED EUROPE

Nazism is typically depicted as the disquieting outcome of chance, political blunders, and exceptional economic mishaps: we are told that all such factors fortuitously conspired to bring to the surface sinister drifts from the depths of European culture, and that the cataclysmic fall of Hitler’s Germany marks a fateful and unrepeatable event in the recent history of the West.The story told in this book says otherwise. Bringing political economy and monetary dynamics into the analysis, Conjuring Hitler shows that far from being fortuitous, Hitler’s rise to power was the result of a painstaking incubation process which Britain set in motion after World War I with a view to finishing Germany off in a second, and conclusive, world conflict. Through a radically different reconstruction of the main historical facts, Conjuring Hitler explains how this maneuver was originally dictated by geopolitical preoccupations at the turn of the twentieth century: clinging to her empire, Britain had grown alarmed at the prospect of an alliance between the German Reich and tsarist Russia. Determined to foil such a development, Britain began by orchestrating World War I, and thereafter set out, with the Weimar Republic, to facilitate the rise of a revanchist movement in Germany. Tasking the Bank of England with the dispensation of financial stimuli and shocks, British strategists, with the complicity of America’s Anglophile elite and through astute political stage-acting, schemed first to enthrone Hitler, and then to finance and arm Nazi Germany in view of the forthcoming clash.This unconventional study shows how Nazism was never considered as an aberration: for the British and American establishment it was an efficacious way of destabilizing Europe and driving Germany into conflict with Stalinist Russia, so as to prevent the formation of any rival continental power bloc.Conjuring Hitler lays bare the economic forces at play in the Third Reich, and identifies the key players in the Anglo-American apparatus who aided Hitler’s meteoric rise to power.This second, revised, and expanded edition includes a new appendix consisting of two reflexive essays respectively on the historiography of Nazism and its significance for Anglo-American cultural hegemony and on the militant role of the “culture of the Left” in upholding the conventional narrative of the advent of the Third Reich. Read more